Wild Shrew Literary Review (WSLR) is Sinister Wisdom’s online book review project. To complement the longer list of suggested books available for review, each month we feature a selection of books being released that month. If you would like to write a review, or if you would like to be added to the WSLR email list to receive the monthly complete book list with book descriptions, please email the WSLR editor, Chloe Berger, at chloe at sinisterwisdom dot org.


April 2025 Featured Books:
1. A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton
2. Awakened by A. E. Osworth
3. Everything Is Fine Here by Iryn Tushabe
4. The Dream of a Common Movement: Selected Writings of Urvashi Vaid edited by Jyotsna Vaid and Amy Hoffman
5. Authority: Essays by Andrea Long Chu
6. Lonely Women Make Good Lovers by Keetje Kuipers
7. Thank You For Calling the Lesbian Line by Elizabeth Lovatt
8. More Butch Heroes by Ria Brodell
9. I Hope This Helps by Samiya Bashir
10. In Your Nature by Estlin McPhee


Book descriptions:

A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton: A transformational, transformative story about videogames, three queer friends, and the code(s) they learn to survive, perfect for fans of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

It is 1998; Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa are teenagers, and they are making Saga of the Sorceress, a game that will change everything, if only for the three of them.

18 years later, Saga of the Sorceress still exists only on the scattered drives of its creators. Lilith might be the first trans woman to ever work as an Assistant Loan Underwriter at Dollarwise Investments in Brooklyn. Sash is in Brooklyn as well, working as a research assistant and part-time webcam dominatrix. Neither knows that the other is there, or that Abraxa, the third member of Invocation LLC, is just across the Hudson River, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s grandparents’ Jersey City home. They have never met in person, and have been out of touch for years, but none have forgotten the sorceress, or her quest, still far from finished.

This new book by Lambda Literary Fellow Jeanne Thornton, one of trans America’s brightest literary stars, queers our notion of nostalgia as it expertly blends literature with technology.

Awakened by A. E. Osworth: A coven of trans witches battles an evil AI in the magical coming-of-middle-age romp about love, loss, drag shows, and late capitalism.

On a morning much like any other, 30-something queer Brooklynite Wilder makes the miraculous discovery: suddenly, as if by magic, they can understand every language in the world. Dazed and disconnected, Wilder is found and taken in by a small coven of trans witches who have all become Awakened with mystical powers of their own. Quibble, a handsome portal traveler, Artemis, the group’s caretaker and seer, and Mary Margaret, a smart-ass teen with telekinetic powers all work to make the cagey and suspicious Wilder feel comfortable, both within their group and with the knowledge that magic is, in fact, real.

Just as Wilder is finding their footing, a malicious AI threatens to dismantle the delicate balance of the coven and the world as they know it. Newly assembled and tenuously bound, the group scrambles to stay united as they parse the difference between difficult and dangerous, asking themselves continuously: is any consciousness—be it artificial, material, or magical—too dangerous to exist?

Awakened is an exhilarating, hilarious and thought-provoking reflection on the ways that we are responsible for creating our own realities, a story of finding community, and a meditation on what it means to have a body (and if it might be far worse never to have had one at all).

Everything Is Fine Here by Iryn Tushabe: A tender coming of age novel set in Uganda in which a young woman grapples with the truth about her sister in a country that punishes gay people.

Eighteen-year-old Aine Kamara has been anticipating a reunion with her older sister, Mbabazi, for months. But when Mbabazi shows up with an unexpected guest, Aine must confront an old fear: her beloved sister is gay in a country with tight anti-homosexuality laws.

Over a weekend at Aine’s all girls’ boarding school, sisterly bonds strengthen, and a new friendship emerges between Aine and her sister’s partner, Achen. Later, a sudden death in the family brings Achen to Mbabazi’s and Aine’s home village, resulting in tensions that put Mrs. Kamara’s Christian beliefs to the test. She issues an ultimatum, forcing Mbabazi to make a difficult choice, but Aine must too. Unable to convince Mama to reconsider, Aine runs away to Mbabazi’s and Achen’s home in Kampala. There she reconnects with Elia, the sophomore at Makerere University she’s had a crush on for a while.

Acclaimed writer Iryn Tushabe’s dazzling debut novel, Everything Is Fine Here, explores the choice Aine must make, and its inevitable and harrowing results.

The Dream of a Common Movement: Selected Writings of Urvashi Vaid edited by Jyotsna Vaid and Amy Hoffman: The Dream of a Common Movement collects essays, interviews, and speeches by the late feminist and civil rights activist Urvashi Vaid, whose pioneering writing and organizing over the course of four decades fundamentally shaped the LGBTQ movement. Vaid explores the LGBTQ movement’s impact on the AIDS epidemic and its challenges as it developed a national presence. She calls out movement leaders and donors for not addressing gender, race, and class issues and passionately argues that the goal of any liberation movement should be transformation, not assimilation. In personal essays, Vaid describes a double consciousness forged by the experience of immigration and a complicated relationship with her Indian-American and lesbian identities. Whether she was focused on the Donors of Color Network, the 22nd Century Initiative, the Lesbian Political Action Committee, or other initiatives she launched, Vaid was steadfast in her vision of a more just society and believed deeply in the power of people coming together to effect change. Offering a window into the breadth of her progressive vision for social change, this volume inspires readers to never stop organizing and marching.

Authority: Essays by Andrea Long Chu: A bold, provocative collection of essays on one of the most urgent questions of our time: What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?

Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers. Authority brings together Chu’s critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1. Chu places The Phantom of the Opera within a centuries-old conflict between music and drama; questions the enduring habit of reading Octavia Butler’s science fiction as a parable of slavery; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism.

Criticism today is having a crisis of authority—but so says every generation of critics. In two magisterial new essays, Chu offers a revised intellectual history of this perennial crisis, tracing the surprisingly political contours of criticism from its origins in the Enlightenment to our present age of social media. Rather than succumbing to an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the genuine crises, from authoritarianism to genocide, that confront us today.

Lonely Women Make Good Lovers by Keetje Kuipers: The daring and deeply sexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with the embodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual.

These unforgettable love poems—queer, complicated, and almost always compromised—engage a poetics of humility, leaning into the painful tendernesses of unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question “defined not by what we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves.” These poems write into that intricate webbing between us, holding space for an “I” that is permeable, that can be touched and changed by those we make our lives with.

In this book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with the fetishization of freedom and the terror of desire. At times valiant and at others self-excoriating, they are flush with the hard-won knowledge of the difficulties and joys of living in relation.

Thank You For Calling the Lesbian Line by Elizabeth Lovatt: With warmth and humour, Elizabeth Lovatt reimagines the women who both called and volunteered for the Lesbian Line in the 1990s, whilst also tracing her own journey from accidentally coming out to disastrous dates to finding her chosen family. With callers and agents alike dealing with first crushes and break-ups, sex and marriage, loneliness and illness (or simply the need to know the name of a gay bar on a night out), this is a celebration of the ordinary lives of queer women.

Through these revelations of the complexities, difficulties and revelries of everyday life, Lovatt investigates the ethics of writing about queer ‘sheros’ and the role living-history plays in the way we live today. What do we owe to our lesbian forebears? What can we learn from them when facing racism, transphobia and ableism in the community today?

Steeped in pop culture references and feminist and queer theory, Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line is timely and vital exploration of how lesbian identity continues to remake and redefine itself in the 21st century, and where it might lead us in the future.

More Butch Heroes by Ria Brodell: The much-anticipated sequel to Butch Heroes, an ingenious retelling of history that combines portraits and texts to recover—and celebrate—queer subjects from around the world.

Ingeniously conceived, Ria Brodell’s Butch Heroes books recover and celebrate queer subjects obscured or misrepresented within the dominant narratives of history. More Butch Heroes presents 15 original paintings and biographies in the style of the first volume, Butch Heroes: slyly subverted Catholic holy cards featuring individuals who were assigned female at birth but who presented as masculine.

In this book, we meet queer individuals in their everyday lives, relaxing or working, enduring their struggles (which sometimes led to death or punishment), or simply living their lives with their partners or pets: Esther Eng stands with her camera in front of the Mandarin Theatre in San Francisco where she worked in the box office as a child. Tom fishes on the Fraser River in British Columbia. Joe sits astride his horse, ready for a day’s work in Southwestern Idaho.

Brodell uses the format of the holy card in its traditional sense, as a means of remembrance and reverence, but also as a way to memorialize those who were often unjustly persecuted by the church. Each deeply researched portrait draws from social class, occupation, clothing, and environmental details of the time period, as well as artifacts, maps, journals, drawings, prints or photos. For Brodell, who was raised Catholic, these queer holy figures act as retrospective replacements for the role models they wish they had known.

I Hope This Helps by Samiya Bashir: Bending genre as a planetary body might bend spacetime, Bashir’s poems live as music and film, as memoir, observation, and critique, as movement across both cosmic and poetic fields.

I Hope This Helps reflects on the excruciating metamorphosis of an artist, “a twinkle-textured disco-ball Jenga set” constrained and shaped by the limits of our reality: time, money, work, not to mention compounding global crises. Think of a river constrained by levees, a bonsai clipped and bent, a human body bursting through shapewear. Begging the question, what can it mean to thrive in the world as it is, Bashir says, “Rats thrive in sewers so / maybe I’m thriving.” In these moving, sometimes harrowing meditations, Bashir reveals her vulnerable inner life, how she has built herself brick by brick into an artist.

In Your Nature by Estlin McPhee: Poems that show us a world in which precedent for gender transition is everywhere if you know how to look.

"I delete my history / badly," writes Estlin McPhee in this searing, witty, lyrical, and elegiac debut collection of poems about intersections of trans identity, magic, myth, family, and religion. The line refers at once to a young person’s browser data that reveals an interest in gender transition; an adult's efforts to reconcile complicated relationships; a culture's campaign to erase queerness and transness from the historical record; and a religion's attempt to pretend that its own particular brand of miraculous transformation is distinct from the kind found in folktales or real life. Populated by transmasculine werewolves, homoerotic Jesuses, adolescent epiphanies, dutiful sisters, boy bands, witches, mothers who speak in tongues, and nonnas who cross the sea, this is a book in which relational and narrative continuity exists, paradoxically, as a series of ruptures with the known.